Lynn Stegner was born in Seattle, Washington. For the most part she grew up in northern California where she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Menlo Park, and subsequently the University of California, Santa Cruz from which she graduated with highest honors in the field of Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing. For several years, in order to support her writing habit, she worked as a wine consultant and marketing representative in the California fine wine industry, studying in France through her employment with a San Francisco-based company. Eventually she and a partner started their own company—marketing, distributing, importing, and producing wine—with offices in the Monterey/Santa Cruz area. In 1986 she married the novelist, historian, and essayist, Page Stegner, and two years later gave birth to their only daughter, Allison (now a Freshman at Stanford University). With publication of her first novel in 1991, she sold her share of the wine company in order to cut down to two fulltime jobs: mother and writer. The family left California in 1999 and took up residence in Vermont where they have long owned a summer home, but the West proved too strong a magnet and within two years they returned, settling inland this time in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In addition to her years in the wine business (in France it was noted that Lynn has an exceptionally keen palate and has been called by close friends an “organoleptic freak”) she was also a whitewater boatman, and has rafted most of the rivers in the Western U.S. Now she prefers early morning sculling on Vermont’s Caspian Lake, or hiking the dusty trails of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Lynn has been the recipient of, among other honors, a National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Fellowship to Ireland, and a Western States Arts Council Fellowship. She is the author of four novels: Undertow and Fata Morgana, both of which were nominated for the National Book Award, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, a novella triptych, (one of the three novellas was awarded the Faulkner Society’s Gold Medal for Best Novella of 1997); and Because a Fire Was in My Head, which won the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for Best Novel of 2005. She has also written a long critical introduction to an assembly of her father-in-law’s short fiction, the Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner, as well as editing and writing the foreword to a Penguin edition entitled Wallace Stegner: On Teaching and Writing Fiction. Lynn herself has taught writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Vermont, the National University of Ireland, Galway, the College of Santa Fe, and at present she directs the Santa Fe Writers’ Workshop. She is currently at work on a volume of short stories, The Anarchic Hand.